The present invention relates to the field of electronic communications and addressing of electronic communications.
Electronic communications, such as email communication, may originate from or be received by many different systems which may adhere to many different standards, protocols, or formats. One set of addressing standards for internet email is defined by RFC2822 published by the Internet Engineering Task Force, but there are many other addressing formats that exist and that may be used. For example, Lotus Domino by IBM Corporation uses an addressing format of the form “First Last/City/State/Country” which is not a valid internet address. Additionally, Lotus Domino addresses may contain characters which are not permitted by RFC2822, such as double byte language (Japanese, Korean, etc.) characters and other single byte characters. Email address groups may have just a group name that may not be a valid internet address.
Mobile client devices (mobile phones, smart phones, tablet computers, etc.) may be used to send, receive, and manage email, contacts, calendars, and other data. Such data may be synchronized with a server or other computer to enable the data on the mobile device to mirror that of the server or other computer. While some servers may support non-internet addresses (such as a Lotus Domino server), some types, brands, and/or models of mobile devices may support only internet addresses and may discard any other address formats as invalid data.